[PRCo] a different sort of Library streetcar

[Derrick Brashear]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net>wrote:

> It happened when the Canadian federal government was telling the provinces
> they should keep them.   I forget the whole deal but the politicians in
> Ottawa were trying to lock Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver and Hamilton into
> long term operation of electric vehicles.   Edmonton and Hamilton
> apparently didn't want it shoved down their throats.
>
> I have no idea what their costs were or even if they looked at them.   I
> do remember some advertising fluff from the late 1940s that General
> Electric passed out in their attempts to sell electric equipment.   They
> were telling transit companies that if you could fill your vehicles every
> five minutes, then a trolley would make money for you.   In the 5-6-7
> minute range, trolley buses could be profitable.   When you got beyond
> around 8 minutes, the diesel bus would earn money.   And if you could not
> keep the vehicle running all day, then you might as well buy a gasoline bus.
>
> Well, those were only generalities.   If you were San Francisco and owned
> your own hydro-electric plants and only had to pay PG&E a modest
> transmission charge, then the trolley bus might just be cheaper than the
> diesel where it would be more expensive in other environments.
>
> But in general, a lot of cities that converted to trolley coaches after
> the war discovered that riding plummeted and what had been cars on a 5
> minute headway soon became a tragedy where they couldn't even fill a bus
> every 20 minutes.   Think Wilkes-Barre, Sioux City, Dallas, Milwaukee,
> Peoria, Baltimore, Birmingham, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Portland, Cleveland
> (can they fill anything today?), Youngstown, Johnstown (they lost two
> thirds of the population).   The problem with the trolleys was identical to
> the rail cars … you could not go beyond the wires.
>
> San Francisco has another advantage … it is hemmed in by water on three
> sides and the population keeps growing.   The land doesn't get any bigger …
> about 7 x 7 miles (46.7 square miles) but the population is the highest it
> has ever been at 805,000 people.  That's over 17,000 per square mile and
> growing … it's one of the most densely settled cities outside of New York.
>   Probably our second most packed city.   So the trolleys work there.
>
> Edmonton … density is 3,000 per square mile.   Their light rail is, like
> many of them, a low-cost commuter railroad.   Not a city trolley system.
> The trolley buses were a local city service.   Downtown Edmonton, the last
> time I looked was a disaster.   That monster mall out to the west side had
> killed most of the downtown stores.
>
>
Well, you've filled in a detail and killed part of your story. Yes,
Pittsburgh metro has people 40 miles out instead of 75% in the core, but
our downtown is ... a mixed bag, not an unmitigated disaster.



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